Hyphens Are Vanishing. Blame E-mail. Sorry, Email.

The hyphen is slowly disappearing, a victim of increasingly high-speed emailing that leaves little time for additional keystrokes. In the most recent edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, about 16,000 compound words that once took hyphens have lost them, including fig leaf, leapfrog, pot belly and test tube, reports Finlo Rohrer for the BBC. The editor of the Shorter OED says the dictionary’s changes follow real-world usage.

“When you are sending emails, and you have to type pretty fast, on the whole it’s easier to type without hyphens,” says Geoffrey Leech, an emeritus linguistics-and-English-language professor at Britain’s Lancaster University. An analysis that compared hyphen usage in a range of publications in 1961 and 1991 suggested a 5% decline in hyphenating over three decades. Chris Robinson, who edits for Scottish Language Dictionaries and gives classes in advanced writing at the University of Edinburgh, says hyphen lessons would be wasted in any case on her undergraduates, who often don’t know the difference between a noun and a verb.

What else is changing in our language?

Michael Kinsley noticed in 2001 how newscasters drop the verb “to be” from their sentences. For instance, “Top government officials today adding their voices to the call for Americans to remain vigilant,” as Lou Dobbs led one report.

Linguist John McWhorter noticed how shopkeepers in New York use apostrophes to convey emphasis. Each day he passes a sign that says “DROP OFF YOUR LAUNDRY ON YOUR WAY TO WORK, ‘PICK IT UP ON YOUR WAY BACK HOME.’”

As modern English has evolved, some compounds have stayed “open” as two words separated by a space (snow tire, fire hose, water cooler), while many others have become “closed” with no intervening space or hyphen (snowman, fireplace, watermelon). [...] [V]ery often there’s variation among open, closed, and hyphenated possibilities. Is it ice cap or icecap? Show-stopper or showstopper? Different dictionaries will give different advice. What the Shorter editors found, with assistance from the Oxford English Corpus, is that there’s an increasing tendency to choose an open or closed form over a hyphenated form. Fig leaf, hobby horse, and water bed stay open, while chickpea, crybaby, and logjam stay closed. [...]

[I]f you’re worried about the electronic age inducing the extinction of the hyphen, keep in mind that some hyphenation patterns have been changing for centuries. John Keats once wrote, “To-day thou wilt not see him, nor to-morrow.” Those hyphens are long gone, and I doubt anyone misses them. I expect we’ll all keep hyphenating away, even if we do so more and more sparingly.

Comments (5 of 14)

I disagree, this is a national tragedy...millions of morse code operators out of work...no more passing lanes on the highway...and lastly they're messing with my mother-in-law so look out...
signed Len Conte
President of
MAMH
Men Against Missing Hyphens

3:40 pm September 24, 2007

Anonymous wrote :

Althought the OED is a wonderful dictionary, it hasn't been the standard in the U.S. at any point. The hyphens being dropped were never used here, and we'll never notice they're missing. The OED is simply closing the divide between English and American English.

2:02 pm September 24, 2007

James McGowan wrote :

And hyphens are even disappearing from ASCII art smiley-faces. Who said it was OK to leave out smiley's nose?
You decide:

:) or the anatomically correct :-)

Is nothing sacred?

2:01 pm September 24, 2007

anon-e-mous wrote :

I be noticin a trend wit da way peeps be speakin. Blame email if you wanna but I know it is deeper dan dat. Peeps be speakin slang. Peeps be writin slang. Dey not know how to write or speak no mo.

11:17 am September 21, 2007

Toastmaster wrote :

I've noticed, as Kinsley and no doubt many others have, how poorly many newscasters speak. They are in the communication business, they make their living with the language, and often they don't even speak properly: not only senseless locutions like dropping "to be," but lazy phrasing like "9 a.m. in the morning," "returning back," "future plans," and many others. With all the stupid TV, movies, video games and general dumbness that permeates this society, people whose business it is to use the language should be crisp and starched in the way they speak.